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Bowl-Eligible College Football Teams (After Week 12)

Thanks to a five-game winning streak, Drew Lock and Missouri are now bowl eligible

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and plenty of college football teams have reason to be thankful as they already know they will be going to a bowl game. For others, they still have a chance this week to get one more win to punch their postseason ticket.

Between the Las Vegas Bowl and Raycom Media Camellia Bowl among the games that kick off bowl season in the middle of December to the Outback Bowl and Citrus Bowl on New Year’s Day, there are 33 bowl games to keep college football fans satisfied from Dec. 16 to Jan. 1 alone. That doesn’t even include the New Year’s Six, which is made up of the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic, PlayStation Fiesta Bowl, Capital One Orange Bowl, and Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, as well as this year’s two College Football Playoff semifinals – Rose Bowl Game Presented by Northwestern Mutual and the Allstate Sugar Bowl.

Add in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in Atlanta on Jan. 8 and that’s 40 total postseason games in a little more than three weeks. This also means that 78 total teams will be taking in this year’s postseason.

Of those spots, 70 have now been claimed through Week 12 with 11 more becoming bowl eligible this past week. The latest additions are Akron, Arizona State, Arkansas State, Boston College, Kansas State, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, Utah State, UTSA and Western Kentucky. Missouri brings the SEC’s total to nine bowl-eligible teams, the most of any conference, while Conference USA now has eight, tied with the ACC for second.

There are 18 teams with five victories and eight of those will be playing each other this week, so that means there will be four “win or go home” matchups to finish out their regular season (Sun Belt's regular season goes through Week 14). With just eight total spots remaining the math is not looking good for any team that may be hoping to get a postseason invite with a 5-7 record by virtue of their Academic Progress Rate (APR), a team-based metric that has been used in the past to fill out the available spots in bowl games.